en the hearer who had listened paled to the roots of his shaggy hair
and his gargoyle face became a mask of tragic fury.

At first Hump Doane did not trust himself to speak and when he did,
there was a moment in which the other feared him almost more than he
feared Bas Rowlett.

For the words of the hunchback came like a roar of thunder and he seemed
on the verge of leaping at his visitor's throat.

"Afore God, ye self-confessed, murderin' liar," he bellowed, "don't seek
ter accuse Bas Rowlett ter me in no sich perjury! He's my kinsman an' my
friend--an' I knows ye lies. Ef ye ever lets words like them cross yore
lips ergin in my hearin' I'll t'ar ther tongue outen yore mouth with
these two hands of mine!"

For a space they stood there in silence, the old man glaring, the
younger slowly coming back from his mania of emotion as from a trance.

Perhaps had Sim sought to insist on his story he would never have been
allowed to finish it, but in that little interval of pause Hump Doane's
passion also passed, as passions too violent to endure must pass.

After the first unsuspected shock, it was borne in on him that there are
confessions which may not be doubted, and that of them this was one. His
mind began to reaccommodate itself, and after a little he said in a
voice of deadly coldness:

"Howsoever, now thet ye've started, go on. I'll hear ye out."

"I'm tellin' ye gospel truth, an' sometimes ther truth hurts," insisted
Sim. "Bas war jealous of Dorothy Harper--an' I didn't dast ter deny
him. He paid me a patch of river-bottom land fer ther job, albeit I
failed."

Hump Doane stood, his ugly face seamed with a scowl of incredulous
sternness, his hand twitching at the ends of his long and gorilla-like
arms. "Go on," he reiterated, "don't keep me waitin'."

Under the evening sky, standing rigid with emotion, Squires doggedly
went on. He told, abating nothing, the whole wretched story from his own
knowledge: how Bas had sought to bring on the war afresh in order that
his enemy Parish Thornton might perish in its flaming; how with the same
end in view Bas had shot at Old Jim; how he himself had been sent to
trail Thornton to Virginia that his master might inform upon him, and
how while the Virginian was away, in jeopardy of his life, the
arch-conspirator had pursued his wife, until she, being afraid to tell
her husband, had come near killing the tormentor herself.

"Hit war Bas thet stirred up ther riders into formin